Once Lured

CHAPTER SEVEN

Riley was in her car and headed back home when she got the call from Bill. She put her phone on speaker.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“We’ve found another body,” he said. “In Delaware.”

“Was it Meara Keagan?” Riley asked.

“No. We haven’t identified the victim. This is just like the other two, only worse.”

Riley let the facts of the situation sink in. Meara Keagan was still being held captive. The killer might be holding other women captive as well. It was all but certain that the killings would continue. How many killings was anybody’s guess.

Bill’s voice was agitated.

“Riley, I’m losing my mind here,” he said. “I know I’m not thinking straight. Lucy’s a great help, but she’s still awfully green.”

Riley understood perfectly how he felt. The irony felt palpable. Here she was beating herself up about the Larry Mullins case. Meanwhile in Delaware, Bill felt as if his own past failure had cost a third woman her life.

Riley thought about the drive to wherever Bill was. It would probably take nearly three hours to get there.

“Are you finished there?” Bill asked.

Riley had told both Bill and Brent Meredith that she would be in Maryland today for the parole hearing.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Good,” Bill said. “I’ve sent a helicopter to pick you up.”

“You what?” Riley said with a gasp.

“There’s a private airport near where you are. I’ll text you the location. The chopper is probably there already. There’s a cadet on board who’ll drive your car back.”

Without another word, Bill ended the call.

Riley drove in silence for a moment. She had been relieved when the hearing had ended during the morning. She wanted to be home when her daughter got out of school. There had been no more arguments yesterday, but April hadn’t said much at all. This morning Riley had left before April was awake.

But the decision had obviously been made for her. Ready or not, she was on the new case. She would have to talk to April later.

But she didn’t have to think long before it seemed perfectly right. She turned her car around and followed the directions Bill had sent her. The surest cure for her feeling of failure would be to bring another killer to justice —real justice.

It was time.

Riley stared down at the dead girl lying on the wooden bandstand floor. It was a bright, cool morning. The bandstand was housed in a gazebo right in the center of the town square, surrounded by nicely kept grass and trees.

The victim looked shockingly like the girls in the photos Riley had seen of the two victims from earlier months. She was lying face up and so emaciated that she appeared to be positively mummified. Her dirty, torn clothing might have once fit but now looked grotesquely large on her. She bore old scars and more recent wounds from what looked like the lashes of a whip.

Riley guessed that she was about seventeen, the age of the other two murder victims.

Or maybe not, she thought.

After all, Meara Keagan was twenty-four. The killer might be changing his MO. This girl was too wasted away for Riley to be able to determine her age.

Riley was standing between Bill and Lucy.

“She looks like she was starved more than the other two,” Bill remarked. “He must have kept her for a lot longer.”

Riley heard a world of self-reproach in Bill’s words. She looked at her partner. The bitterness showed in his face as well. Riley knew what Bill was thinking. This girl had surely been alive and held captive when he’d investigated this case and come up with nothing. He was blaming himself for her death.

Riley knew that he shouldn’t blame himself. Even so, she didn’t know what to say to make him feel better. Her own regrets about the Larry Mullins case still left a bad taste in her mouth.

Riley turned around to take in her surroundings. From here, the only completely visible structure was the courthouse across the street – a large brick building with a clock tower. Redditch was a charming little colonial town. Riley wasn’t really surprised that the body could have been brought here in the dead of night without anybody noticing. The whole town would have been fast asleep. The square was lined with sidewalks, so the killer hadn’t left any footprints.

The local police had taped off the square and were keeping onlookers away. But Riley could see that some press had gathered outside the tapes.

She was worried. So far, the press hadn’t caught on that the two previous murders and Meara Keagan’s disappearance had all been connected. But with this new murder, somebody was liable to connect the dots. The public would know sooner or later. Then the investigation would become a lot more difficult.

Standing nearby was Redditch’s police chief Aaron Pomeroy.

“How and when was the body found?” Riley asked him.

“We’ve got a street cleaner who goes out to work before dawn. He found her.”

Pomeroy looked badly shaken. He was an overweight, aging man. Riley figured that even in a little town like this, a cop his age had handled a murder or two somewhere along the line. But he’d probably never dealt with anything this disturbing.

Agent Lucy Vargas crouched beside the corpse and studied it closely.

“Our killer’s awfully confident,” Lucy said.

“How do you figure?” Riley asked.

“Well, he’s putting the bodies out for display,” she said. “Metta Lunoe was found in an open field, Valerie Bruner by the side of a road. Only about half of all serial killers transport their victims away from the murder site. Of those who do, about half conceal them. And most bodies that are left in view are just dumped. This kind of display suggests that he’s pretty cocky.”

Riley was pleased that Lucy had paid good attention in class. But somehow she didn’t think that cockiness was this killer’s point. He wasn’t trying to show off or taunt the authorities. He was up to something else. Riley didn’t yet know what it was.

But she was pretty sure it had something to do with the way the body was laid out. It was both awkward and deliberate. The girl’s left arm was stretched straight above her head. Her right arm was also straight but placed slightly to one side of her body. Even the head, with its broken neck, had been straightened to align as well as possible with the rest of the body.

Riley thought back to the photos of the other victims. She noticed that Lucy was carrying a tablet computer.

Riley asked her, “Lucy, could you bring up the photos of the other two corpses?”

It took Lucy only a few seconds to comply. Riley and Bill crowded next to Lucy to look at the two images.

Bill pointed and said, “Metta Lunoe’s corpse was a mirror image of this one – right arm raised, left arm to the side of the body. Valerie Bruner’s right arm was raised but her left arm was placed across the body, pointed downwards.”

Riley stooped down and took hold of the corpse’s wrist and tried to move it. The whole arm was immobile. Rigor mortis had fully set in. It would take a medical examiner to determine the exact time of death, but Riley felt pretty sure that the girl had been dead for at least nine hours. And like the other girls, she’d been moved to this spot shortly after she’d been killed.

The more she looked, the more something nagged at Riley. The killer had gone to so much trouble to arrange the corpse. He’d carried the body across the square, up six stairs, and had meticulously manipulated it. Even so, its overall position didn’t make sense.

The body wasn’t aligned with any of the gazebo walls. It wasn’t related to the opening of the gazebo or to the courthouse or anything else that Riley could see. It seemed to be laid out at a random angle.

But this guy doesn’t do anything random, she thought.

Riley sensed that the killer was trying to communicate something. She had no idea what it might be.

“What do you make of the poses?” Riley asked Lucy.

“I don’t know,” Lucy said. “Not many killers actually pose their bodies. It’s weird.”

She’s still really new to this job, Riley reminded herself.

Lucy hadn’t caught on that the weird cases were exactly the ones they routinely got called in for. For seasoned agents like Riley and Bill, weirdness had long since become numbingly normal.

Riley said, “Lucy, let’s take a look at the map.”

Lucy brought up the map that showed where the other two bodies had been found.

“The bodies have been placed in a pretty tight cluster,” Lucy said, pointing again. “Valerie Bruner was found less than ten miles from where Metta Lunoe was found. And this one is less than ten miles from where Valerie Bruner was found.”

Riley could see that Lucy was right. However, Meara Keagan had disappeared quite a few miles to the north in Westree.

“Does anybody see any connections among the locations?” Riley asked Bill and Lucy.

“Not really,” Lucy said. “Metta Lunoe’s body was in a field outside of Mowbray. Valerie Bruner’s was just along the edge of a highway. And now this one right in the middle of a small town. It’s almost as if the killer was looking for places that have nothing in common.”

Just then Riley heard shouting from among the onlookers.

“I know who did it! I know who did it!”

Riley, Bill, and Lucy all turned to look. A young man was waving and shouting from behind the tape.

“I know who did it!” he cried again.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Riley took a careful look at the man who was shouting. She could see that several people around him were nodding and murmuring in agreement.

“I know who did it! We all know who did it!”

“Josh is right,” a woman next to him said. “It’s got to be Dennis.”

“He’s a weirdo,” another man said. “That guy has always been a ticking bomb.”

Bill and Lucy hurried toward the edge of the square where the man was shouting, but Riley held her position. She called out to one of the cops beyond the tape.

“Bring him over here,” she said, pointing to the man who was doing the yelling.

She knew it was important to separate him from the group. If everybody started pitching in with stories, the truth would be impossible to untangle. If there was any truth in what everybody was yelling about.

Besides, reporters were starting to cluster around him. It wouldn’t do for Riley to interview the guy right under their noses.

The cop lifted the tape and escorted the man toward them.

He was still yelling, “We all know who did it! We all know who did it!”

“Calm down,” Riley said, taking him by the arm and leading him far enough away from the onlookers to be able to talk to him unheard.

“Ask anybody about Dennis,” the agitated man was saying. “He’s a loner. He’s weird. He scares girls. He annoys women.”

Riley got out her notepad, and so did Bill. She saw the intense interest in Bill’s eyes. But she knew they’d better take things slowly. They barely knew anything just yet. Besides, this man was so agitated that Riley felt wary of his judgment. She needed to hear from somebody more neutral.

“What’s his full name?” Riley asked.

“Dennis Vaughn,” the man said.

“Keep talking to him,” Riley told Bill.

Bill nodded and kept taking notes. Riley walked back to the gazebo, where Police Chief Aaron Pomeroy was still standing beside the body.

“Chief Pomeroy, what can you tell me about Dennis Vaughn?”

Riley could tell by his expression that the name was all too familiar.

“What do you want to know about him?” he asked.

“Do you think he might be a viable suspect?”

Pomeroy scratched his head. “Now that you mention it, maybe so. At least he might be worth talking to.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, we’ve had a lot of trouble with him for years. Indecent exposure, lewd behavior, that kind of thing. A couple of years ago it was window peeping, and he spent some time in the Delaware Psychiatric Center. Last year he got obsessed with a high school cheerleader, wrote letters to her and stalked her. The girl’s family got a court injunction, but he ignored it. So he did six months in prison.”

“When was he released?” she asked.

“Back in February.”

Riley was getting more and more interested. Dennis Vaughn had gotten out of prison shortly before the killings had started. Was it merely a coincidence?

“Local girls and women are starting to complain,” Pomeroy said. “Rumor has it that he’s been snapping pictures of them. It’s nothing we can arrest him for – at least not yet.”

“What else can you tell me about him?” Riley asked.

Pomeroy shrugged. “Well, he’s kind of a bum. He’s maybe thirty years old and he’s never held down a job that anybody can remember. Sponges off family he’s got here in town – aunts, uncles, grandparents. I hear that he’s been real sullen lately. Holds it against the whole town that he had to do prison time. He keeps telling folks, ‘One of these days.’”

“‘One of these days’ what?” Riley asked.

“Nobody knows. Folks have started calling him a ticking bomb. They don’t know what he might do next. But he’s actually never been violent that we know of.”

Riley’s mind was racing, trying to make sense of this possible new lead.

Meanwhile, Bill and Lucy had finished talking to the man and were walking toward Riley and Pomeroy.

Bill’s face looked bright and confident – a sudden change from his recent gloomy demeanor.

“Dennis Vaughn’s our killer, all right,” he told Riley. “Everything the guy just told us fits the profile perfectly.”

Riley didn’t reply. It was starting to seem likely, but she knew better than to jump to conclusions.

Besides, the certainty in Bill’s voice made her nervous. Ever since she’d arrived here this morning, she’d felt like Bill was teetering on the brink of really erratic behavior. It was understandable given his personal feelings about the case, especially his guilt over not solving it sooner. But it could also get to be a serious problem. She needed him to be his usual rock-solid self.

She turned toward Pomeroy.

“Could you tell us where to find him?”

“Sure,” Pomeroy said, pointing. “Walk straight along Main Street until you get to Brattleboro. Turn left, and his house is the third one to the right.”

Riley told Lucy, “You stay and wait for the medical examiner’s team. It’s fine for them to take the body right away. We’ve got lots of photographs.”

Lucy nodded.

Bill and Riley walked toward the police tape, where reporters craned toward them with cameras and microphones.

“Does the FBI have a statement to make?” asked one.

“Not yet,” Riley said.

She and Bill ducked under the tape and pushed their way among the reporters and onlookers.

Another reporter yelled, “Does this killing have anything to do with the murders of Metta Lunoe and Valerie Bruner?”

“Or with Meara Keagan’s disappearance?” another asked.

Riley bristled. It wouldn’t be long before the news was widespread that there was a serial killer in Delaware.

“No comment,” she snapped at the reporters. Then she added, “If you keep following us I’ll arrest you for interfering with an investigation. It’s called obstruction of justice.”

The reporters backed away. Riley and Bill disentangled themselves from the small crowd and continued on their way. Riley knew they wouldn’t have a lot of time on this case before other, more aggressive reporters arrived on the scene. They were likely to have a lot of media attention to deal with.

It was a short walk to Dennis Vaughn’s house. After just three blocks, they got to Brattleboro and turned left.

Vaughn’s house was a dilapidated little ruin with a heavily dented tin roof, peeling white paint, and a sagging front porch. The lawn was knee-deep with grass and weeds, and an old, decrepit-looking Plymouth Valiant was parked in the driveway. The vehicle was certainly large enough for the transportation of emaciated corpses.

Bill and Riley walked up onto the porch and knocked on the screen door.

“Whaddya want?” called a voice from inside.

“Are we speaking to Dennis Vaughn?” Bill answered.

“Yeah, maybe. Why?”

Riley said, “We’re with the FBI. We want to talk to you.”

The front door opened. Dennis Vaughn stood behind the screen door, which was still hooked shut. He was an unsavory-looking young man, overweight, with a shaggy beard. Excessive body hair showed under his torn, food-stained undershirt.

“What’s this all about?” Vaughn asked in a petulant, quavering voice. “Are you here to arrest me or what?”

“We’ve just got some questions,” Riley said, showing her badge. “Could we come inside?”

“Why should I let you in?” Vaughn asked.

“Why shouldn’t you let us in?” Riley asked. “You don’t have anything to hide, do you?”

“We could come back with a warrant,” Bill added.

Vaughn shook his head and growled. He unhooked the screen door and Bill and Riley stepped inside.

The house was even more of a wreck inside. The wallpaper was peeling, and there were broken gaps in the floorboards. There was hardly any furniture – just a couple of battered straight-back chairs and a couch with its stuffing hanging out. Plates and bowls were scattered everywhere, some of them filled with moldy food. Disagreeable smells filled the air.

What caught Riley’s eye were dozens of photographs randomly thumbtacked to the walls. All of them were of women and girls in casual, unsuspecting poses.

Vaughn noticed Riley’s interest in the pictures.

“It’s my hobby,” he said. “Is there anything wrong with that?”

Riley didn’t reply, and Bill said nothing. Riley doubted there was anything illegal about the pictures themselves. It looked as if they’d all been taken outdoors in public places in broad daylight, and none were actually indecent. Even so, the very act of snapping pictures of girls and women without their knowledge or consent struck Riley as deeply creepy.

Vaughn sat down on a wooden chair that creaked under his weight.

“You’re here to accuse me of something,” he said. “So why don’t you get on with it?”

Riley sat down on another rickety chair facing him. Bill stood beside her.

“What do you think we’re here to accuse of you of?” she asked.

It was an interview technique that had worked well for her in the past. Sometimes it was best not to start with direct questions about a case. Sometimes it was better to get a potential suspect talking until he tripped himself up with his own words.

Vaughn shrugged.

“One thing or another,” he said. “It’s always something. Everybody always misunderstands.”

“Misunderstands what?” Riley asked, still trying to coax him along.

“I like girls, okay?” he said. “What guy my age doesn’t? Why do people think everything I do is wrong just because I do it?”

He glanced around at some of the pictures, as if he hoped they’d say something to defend him. Riley just waited for him to keep talking. She hoped that Bill would do the same, but her partner’s impatience was tense and palpable.

“I try to be friendly with girls,” he said. “Can I help it if they don’t understand?”

His voice was slow, even a bit sluggish. Riley felt pretty sure he wasn’t drunk or drugged. Perhaps he was a bit mentally slow or had some neurological problem.

“Why do you think people treat you differently?” Riley said, trying to sound almost sympathetic.

“How should I know?” Vaughn said, shrugging again.

Then in an almost inaudible sullen voice he added …

“One of these days.”

“‘One of these days’ what?” Riley asked.

Vaughn shrugged yet again. “Nothing. I don’t mean anything. But one of these days. That’s all I’m saying.”

Riley felt encouraged that his talk was becoming nonsensical. That often happened before a suspect really betrayed himself.

But before Vaughn could say anything else, Bill stepped toward him menacingly.

“What do you know about the murders of Metta Lunoe and Valerie Bruner?”

“I never heard of them,” Vaughn said.

Bill bent uncomfortably close to him and peered into his eyes. Riley was worried now. She wanted to tell Bill to knock it off. But interfering might make things worse.

“What about Meara Keagan?” Bill asked.

“Never heard of her either.”

Bill was talking more loudly now.

“Where were you last Thursday night?”

“I don’t know.”

“You mean you weren’t at home?”

Vaughn was sweating nervously. His eyes were wide with alarm.

“Maybe I wasn’t. I don’t keep track. I go out sometimes.”

“Where do you go?”

“I go driving around. I like to get out of town. I hate this town. I wish I could live someplace else.”

Bill spat his next question in Vaughn’s face.

“And where were you driving around last Thursday?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know if I was driving around that night.”

“You’re lying,” Bill shouted. “You were driving around Westree, weren’t you? You found a nice lady there, didn’t you?”

Riley shot out of her seat. Bill was clearly out of control now. She had to stop him.

“Bill,” she said quietly, grabbing him by the shoulder.

Bill shoved away her hand. He pushed Vaughn over in the chair. Already on the verge of breaking, the chair fell to pieces. Vaughn was sprawled on the floor for a moment. Then Bill grabbed him by the undershirt and hauled him across the room, pushing him back first against the wall.

“Bill, stop it,” Riley shouted.

Bill was pressing Vaughn against the wall. Riley was afraid he might pull his gun at any second.

“Prove it!” Bill snarled.

Riley managed to get between Bill and Vaughn. She pushed Bill back forcefully.

“That’s enough!” she snapped loudly. “We’re leaving!”

Bill was staring at her, his eyes wild with rage.

Riley turned to Vaughn and said, “I’m sorry. My partner’s sorry. We’ll go now.”

Without waiting for Vaughn to say anything, Riley shoved Bill toward the front door, then out onto the porch.